The Guardians

'Wel, maybe I do too.'

'Can't you just let it go?'

'You think this is because I'm curious?'

'Aren't you?'

'I would be if I thought it was just you screwing some other girl. But it's not that. It's not something we can hide away.'

'Why not?'

'I could if you could. But you can't. And it's kiling you. You can't see that yet, but it is.'

I started away in anger, but Sarah grabbed me by the arm and spun me back to face her.

'I had a dream the other night with you in it. In fact, there was nobody else,' she said. 'This old man walking along a beach wanting to say, 'Look at that sunset' or Those waves are coming in high' but never opening your mouth because there is nobody there to say it to.'

I thought she was about to cry. But it was me, already crying.

'I know you, Trevor.'

'Yeah.'

'Then you have to trust me. And if not me, I hope you find someone else.'

I watched her walk to the street, where she paused. It was an opportunity for me to go to her. A held hand might have done it. Matched footsteps for the last hundred yards to her house, where I could have told her I'd see her tomorrow. But by the time I decided which of these felt more right she'd started off on her own, and there was no way of folowing.

We lost the first game of the playoffs to Seaforth. For most in Grimshaw this was a disappointment. A handful might even have found it an outrage. But for us, it confirmed that the coach was Heather Langham's murderer.

Most of the other players wrote off the coach's screwed-up line changes and listless pre-game talk as an off night. But we saw more than mere distraction in his struggle to remember our names, the out-of-character insults at the ref for making a tripping cal on Dave Hurley (who was guiltily on his way to the penalty box anyway).

Even more teling, he put Ben in net.

Halfway through the third period, our team behind 3-1 but stil with enough time for a chance to tie the game up, the coach summoned Vince Sproule to the bench and tapped Ben on the shoulder.

'You want this?' he said.

Not You're in or Shut 'em down or McAuliffe! Get in there! but a question .

You want this?

Spoken through the cage of Ben's mask so that he was the one player on the bench who heard. A whisper that could be understood only as a warning or a chalenge.

Ben played wel, by Ben standards. But by then the team had been thrown off by trailing a 'bunch of dung- heeled inbreds' (as Carl caled the Seaforth squad) and the coach's odd decision of sending our backup goalie in to finish the game, and we slowed, coughing up pucks, leaving Ben to fend for himself. He let in another two before the buzzer.

'That's it. That's it,' I remember Ben muttering as he came off the ice to the rare sound of boos echoing through the Grimshaw Arena. The others assumed he was voicing his frustration at being hung out to dry by his teammates. But we knew he'd come to a conclusion.

There was a new clarity in Ben's eyes I saw even as he skated out from his net, a look he shot toward the bench that our felow players saw as anger and we saw as stern resolve, but that now, in hindsight, might have been the first hint of madness.

[8]

I've been up for a couple of hours when there's a knock at my door. Tap-slide, tap-slide, tap- slide. The way the boy might ask to come in.

I'd dreamed about him al last night—dreams of me wandering through the Thurman house, sensing something just ahead or just behind, until a pair of cold hands drape over my eyes and I can smel the rancid breath of his laugh before he sinks his teeth into the back of my neck—and awakened to the threadbare sheets of my Queen's Hotel bed glued to me with sweat. A shower of brownish water helped remind me that these were only Grimshaw nightmares, and would retreat as soon as I was able to leave. Yet when the three evenly spaced knocks at the door come— tap-slide, tap-slide, tap-slide—al such comforting thoughts skitter away. And in place of my own voice in my head, there is the boy's.

Can Trev come out and play?

I go to the door because he wil never go away if I don't, and it is the only way out. And because the answer to his question is yes. Trev has nothing better to do. He can come out and play.

The doorknob is a bal of ice in my hand. This, I tel myself, is likely only another quirky symptom of Parkinson's I've noticed of late, the exaggerated hots and colds of things. Yet my fingers remain frozen to the brass, unwiling to turn the knob, unable to pul away.

Open up, the boy says.

The door swings back. So unexpected its edge slices into my shoulder, knocking me back a half-step.

'Jesus,' Randy says, slouching in the hal, his T-shirt and jeans crosshatched with wrinkles. 'You look worse than I feel.'